The Politics of Irish Boston

Partisan rancor, corruption and a scandal involving a dancer called 'Toodles.' Maybe today's politics aren't so unusual after all.

By

Michael Moynihan

March 15, 2012 5:44 p.m. ET

Every year in South Boston, Massachusetts politicians and power brokers crowd the dais at a St. Patrick's Day breakfast wearing gaudy green sweaters, warbling "Danny Boy" and ribbing their fellow eighth-generation-Hibernian pols. In 2010, Gerry Adams, the former Irish Republican Army commander, addressed the group, thanking the city's Irish-American population for helping advance the cause of republicanism (the armed, Fenian variety). Mr. Adams, once banned from traveling to the U.S. because of his violent past, received a standing ovation.

There is something faintly ridiculous about these Boston celebrations of Irishness, the wistful talk of a country that most have never visited. Southie, once the center of Boston's Irish community—and now a semi-gentrified neighborhood of both housing projects and luxury condos—was in the 1970s the only place outside of Northern Ireland where one could find murals celebrating the IRA.

Boston is obsessive about its Irish tribalism. And while bookstore shelves heave with studies of the Irish diaspora in America, there are few books—discounting the countless paeans to the Kennedy clan—that specifically cover the Irish influence on Massachusetts politics. In "Rogues and Redeemers: When Politics Was King in Irish Boston," Gerard O'Neill, a former reporter for the Boston Globe and co-author of a biography of the mobster James "Whitey" Bulger, attempts to fill that gap. According to the publisher, the book offers a "hidden history" of the city's Irish-American political machine.

Unfortunately, Mr. O'Neill has produced a rather straightforward recapitulation of Irish politics in the Hub, sticking to the well-established narrative of mustache-twisting Brahmins (or "Yankee overlords," in Mr. O'Neill's phrasing) doing battle against spirited, rascally Irish politicians. Indeed, "Rogues and Redeemers" doesn't so much upend myths as reinforce them. In Irish America, tales of rampant employment discrimination by Yankee businessmen, who posted signs warning "No Irish need apply" are accepted as gospel. Such anti-Irish bias, writes Mr. O'Neill, was "commonly found in newspapers" and became "so commonplace that it soon had an acronym: NINA."

ENLARGE

Rogues and Redeemers

By Gerard O'Neill (Crown, 401 pages, $26)

But according to historian Richard Jensen, there is almost no proof to support the claim that NINA was a common hiring policy in America. Mr. Jensen reported in the Journal of Social History in 2002 that "the overwhelming evidence is that such signs never existed" and "evidence from the job market shows no significant discrimination against the Irish." The tale has been so thoroughly discredited that, in 2010, the humor magazine Cracked ranked it No. 2 on a list of "6 Ridiculous History Myths (You Probably Think Are True)." Mr. O'Neill doesn't inspire confidence by faithfully accepting NINA as fact.

The author does provide entertaining, encyclopedia-like chapters on the patronage machine of James Michael Curley, who served as mayor of Boston four times between 1914 and 1950; on the Camelot forebear John "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald, whose dalliances with a dancer called "Toodles" in 1915 derailed his political career; on the largely forgotten turn-of-the-century Irish-born ward boss Martin Lomasney; and on the soon-to-be-forgotten mayor of more recent vintage, Ray Flynn. But Mr. O'Neill makes little effort to place these figures in the larger context of Irish-American politics. How, for instance, does one account for the popularity of a crook like Curley, who did two stints in prison for corruption? Patronage certainly helped, but "many Irish love a crook and a brawler," Mr. O'Neill says.

The story of forced busing—one of the last major fights of the civil-rights movement and a colossal failure that transformed the demography of Boston—is well covered, though Mr. O'Neill leans too heavily on J. Anthony Lukas's Pulitzer Prize-winning book, "Common Ground" (1985), offering little original research on the subject. The ugly, protracted battles over busing in Southie, Charlestown and Hyde Park divided the city and exacerbated long-simmering racial tensions, but to Mr. O'Neill, who often overstates and overwrites, busing "became Boston's Vietnam." And cribbing the title of Arthur Koestler's classic book on Stalinist mass murder, Mr. O'Neill writes that the desegregation fight "was darkness at noon in Boston."

Mr. O'Neill acknowledges the ultimate failure of busing to ameliorate segregation or improve minority education; and he recognizes the legitimate grievances of those South Boston parents who objected to their children being forced into schools outside their communities. But he does not hesitate to heap criticism on figures like Louise Day Hicks, an antibusing firebrand whom he describes as "frumpy," "pampered" and "anti-minority," while being far too generous to the plan's advocates.

"Rogues and Redeemers" wisely avoids retelling, for the umpteenth time, the story of the Kennedy machine. But curiously absent are figures like Albert "Dapper" O'Neil, the thunderbolt-throwing conservative Democrat who was a fixture of local Massachusetts politics, and former state-senate president and political kingmaker Billy Bulger, who, like O'Neil, modeled his political career on the "rascal king" James Michael Curley.

It's difficult to tell what audience "Rogues and Redeemers" is aimed at. The detailed accounts of local scandals and political rivalries are too inside-baseball for a general audience and not rigorous enough for a specialized one. And the hard-boiled writing can be a touch embarrassing. Mr. O'Neill says that, during the Irish Famine, "potatoes rotted in undulating profusion." And Kevin White, Boston's mayor from 1968 to 1984, is said to be "stewing in black Irish juice" as he broods over media criticism.

For those who believe our current political climate to be uniquely rancorous and corrupt, "Rogues and Redeemers" provides a useful reminder that it was always so. But the rogues of Boston politics, Irish or otherwise, deserve a better book—one that offers more criticism and less redemption.

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